HOW ELON’S IDEAS WILL NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEMS HE’S OUTLINED AND WILL MAKE SOME OF THEM WORSE

The problems with Elon’s efforts are numerous and substantial. First, while some of his solutions will make a dent in urban mobility issues, they do not solve the problems they claim to solve, and worse, overally will do much more harm than good. Second, the scope of the problem is much, much larger than Elon Musk recognizes, or chooses to publicly admit.

Here is how his solutions, for the most part, do not solve the challenges he himself has outlined and how they may make things worse:

Pollution: It’s well known that gasoline cars emit pollution via their tailpipes. What is almost completely unknown is the fact that all cars, gas AND electric, emit tiny particulates. Because cars are so damn heavy, they require enormous tires which wear out over time. Where does all that rubber go? Unfortunately, in the air and to your lungs.

Traffic: Solving traffic with autonomy and tunnels is one of Elon’s most fallacious claims.

Cars are the lowest bandwidth mobility technology we’ve ever devised. As a comparison, a 12 ft lane can move 14,000 people on bikes or 43,000 people with rapid transit buses per hour. Cars achieve a paltry 2000 people per lane, per hour.

Cars are the 56k modem of urban mobility. Autonomous vehicles will only add a bit more capacity in the short term. And tunnels, according to Elon will, at best, double this capacity, to 4000 people per hour. It’s a DSL copper wire stopgap to a problem requiring high speed fiber optic cables.

Call them innovative. Call them 3D infrastructure. Elon’s tunnels are simply adding more lanes. Literally more of the same.

His claim of theoretically unlocking unlimited capacity is still problematic. First, even with boring cost reductions, digging is expensive. And second, there will always be bottlenecks entering and exiting tunnels. Even if these problems are overcome, induced demand itself knows no bounds. So levels of car use will always be chasing road capacity, never actually allowing for that magical goal of “unlimited” capacity.

THE TRUE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM

Energy efficiency: Cars are the least efficient mode of mobility invented by humans. Bill Gates and others constantly talk about our energy problem and the need for an “energy miracle.”

Yet our so-called energy problem has two sides: production and consumption. When we squander enormous amounts of energy moving 4-6 tons of metal whose sole purpose is to move 100-200 lb humans, of course its going to seem like don’t have enough energy production! It doesn’t matter where that energy comes from: dirty fossil fuels, solar, wind, nuclear. At the end of the day if our cities are car-centric, we will be wasting billions of dollars worth of energy needlessly shuffling billions of tons of metal back and forth.

Immobility and health issues: We’re calling this the Wall-E problem. Instead of a healthy walk or bike ride, more and more people on the planet are simply sitting in their cars. Immobility causes all kinds of detrimental health impacts: Blood clots, hormone imbalance, heartburn, kidney stones, ulcers, depression, osteoporosis, back pain, etc. This decrease in health causes all sorts of havoc from personal/emotional to societal/economic.

Affordability: Cars are expensive. And when cities are designed around cars, it forces people to buy one in order to get around or else be relegated to poorly funded public transit, miles of walking due to car-caused low-density sprawl, or biking next to speeding, texting cars, risking their life. Why should someone have to spend at least $20,000 for the basic human right to simply move around in their city comfortably, a right any city dweller has had for millennia? Car-centrism puts comfortable and safe mobility access out of reach of millions of citizens.

Another way of looking at it: cars decrease local business spending by 40%, which then shrinks local city coffers, making us all poorer.

Evil oil wars: While EVs paired with a clean grid will help with decreasing our oil dependence, manufacturing and infrastructure still require immense amounts of oil. And dependence on foreign oil has proved morally and financially disastrous, fueling horrendous foreign policy decisions and oil wars.

Manufacturing and infrastructure oil aside, shifting to electric vehicles will simply require making a deal with a different devil, simply trading one set of terrible foreign policy decisions for others. Why? Lithium. China controls most of the world’s lithium.

IT’S THE CAR, STUPID

Most, if not all of these issues stem from one primary physics problem: the enormous size and weight of private automobiles.

In other words, it’s the car, stupid.

This is quite baffling since Elon often touts his deep knowledge of physics, frequently recommending people study the subject. He should take a page from his own physics book!

Yet Elon Musk is doubling down on the most expensive, the slowest, the most energy intensive, the lowest bandwidth, the least healthy, the most wasteful, the most deadly form of transportation we have.

Talk about going for records in all the wrong ways!

LET’S TURN ELON’S SCRIP ON IT’S HEAD

In our next post we will discuss how to solve urban mobility by turning Elon’s plans upside-down.

Instead of digging underground like mole people, we should aim to soar.